Conn is an IRA murderer serving a life sentence in an Irish prison. He is given a 24 hour home leave during which he goes from point to point in Belfast looking to revenge his lover's murder.
They were a top team - five miners who together had mined a million tons of coal but now they must face up to redundancy.
In the run-up to a General Election, the British Prime Minister thinks he is receiving messages from God.
Kaz and her friends spend their days trying to get by and their nights in a homeless shelter. But how did they end up there and what does the future hold for them?
Sometimes Busi is a champion boxer, sometimes a rock star. But when he escapes from court, where he is facing charges of assault, he embarks on an odyssey that brings him before his estranged father.
In the autumn of 1773, the English writer Samuel Johnson visits the Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the North-West coast of Scotland. With him are his friend, the Scotsman James Boswell, and his black servant Francis Barber. Staying with a series of hosts, including elderly Jacobite heroine Flora McDonald, Johnson and Boswell encounter traditional Scottish hospitality at first-hand, all the time arguing about politics (and in Boswell's case losing his head over every pretty woman he meets). Meanwhile, Francis and another black servant they encounter provide evidence of the new consciousness emerging in Britain's soon-to-be-independent American colonies.